Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Still Alive

It's been awhile since I last updated here. In fact, I think my last update was a rant about certain fandom tropes I hate. I'm pretty sure I was either still in the Avengers or Teen Wolf fandom... or in between fandoms.


On the fandom front...
Early on in April, for reasons I no longer remember, I decided to give the Homestuck fandom another try.

Now I'll admit that I'd been vaguely interested in the Homestuck fandom for a while, mostly because a) I kept seeing people mention it, and b) because it looked to have a fairly sizable fandom on AO3.  I vaguely recall skimming through the first two Acts on the MSPA wiki and even making a halfhearted attempt to read the first Act of the comic itself once. Needless to say I didn't get very far on either front since the first Act of Homestuck is both silly and slow paced, and there is a lot of unfamiliar terminology to keep track of for a newbie. The wiki helped a little, but I never really read far enough ahead on the summary pages to see any reason to continue reading back then. I bookmarked it, and then moved on. That was sometime in August last year according to the time-stamp on the bookmark.
 
So three months ago, in the early days of April, I decided to give Homestuck another try. I can't remember why, although it could be as simple as seeing the amount of fic on AO3 was enough that it would take more than a few days to read though the fandom completely, or it could be because I saw an interesting looking crossover. I can't remember. Wait. No. I do remember.

It did start with a crossover that looked really interesting- I think I was a Doctor Who crossover- but the important thing was that it specified that knowledge up to ACT 5 was essential to understand anything. And so, with a potentially good fic as incentive, I decided to actually sit down and read enough of the web comic that I could read the story I wanted to read. This time I made it though to the end of Act One, and with one small but awesome flash animation I was hooked.

According to my History, I was poking back into the DC comics fandom until the 6th of April, where my History starts early Act 2 and indicates that I read until mid Act 4until the 7th pretty much non-stop. I seem to have then taken a break to check on various fic and the like until the 11th, where I began reading Homestuck again from my 'saved game' in Act Four and continued reading until  I reached ACT 6 ACT 5 ACT 2: The Trickster Act, which I thought was a good stopping point. Incidentally, this was on April 15th, the day after it was announced that Homestuck was going on hiatus for 'months'. Said hiatus actually only turned out to be two months, but that still seemed like a good enough stopping point so as not to have to suffer any cliff hangers. Also, it was a good point at which to finally enter fandom.

Before I go on, however, I should point out that my original plan of spending a few days reading up to the end of ACT 5 to read a random crossover should have been completely impossible. I was basing this assumption on the general lengths of other web-comics, and expected to read it in maybe three days to a week at a fairly leisurely pace, maybe in between reading fic and doing other things. I was completely oblivious to Homestuck's status as one of the longest web-comics on the internet.
Here is a list containing the number of pages for each arc:

ACT 1 - 247
ACT 2 - 511
ACT 3 -  395
INTERMISSION -204
ACT 4 - 631
ACT 5 ACT 1 - 636
ACT 5 ACT 2 -  1483
INTERMISSION 2 - 2
ACT 6 ACT 1 - 182
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1 - 125
ACT 6 ACT 2 -247
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 2 - 153
ACT 6 ACT 3 - 443
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3 - 175
ACT 6 ACT 4 - 3
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 4 - 72
ACT 6 ACT 5 - 415 (ACT 1 - is 202 page and ACT 2 is 64 and ACT 1 X2 is 149)
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5 - 309
ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 1 - ongoing

This means that, from ACT 1 to ACT 6 ACT 1 , I read 5711 pages of comics in a bit under a week, the majority being in between April 11th and April 15th. That isn't counting the times spent playing the various awesome browser games and waiting for the flash animations to load. In that time I pretty much only slept very little. The following are timestamps for when I was on the MSPA site on those days according to my browser history.

April 11th - 9:06 PM -11:42 PM
April 12th 12:03AM- 7:02 AM,  11:48 AM- 11:58 PM
April 13th 12:01 AM - 6:27 AM, 6:48 PM- 11:53 PM
April 14th -  12:01 AM - 5:01 AM. 12:45 PM- 11:59 PM
April 15th   12:03 AM - 3:30 AM, 12:09 PM- 11:42 PM

I don't actually recall much of that week other than reading Homestuck. Apparently I was acting so obsessively that my family was concerned about me and my sister was starting to talk to me like I was a crazy person. I once freaked out because she was making the internet slow by downloading an update for her phone.

Anyway. After the 15th I dove into the fandom and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the month, starting with fic that was recommended on Television Tropes. By the end of April I had mostly read all the 'big name' fics in the fandom, minus one or two that were too angst ridden or contained subject matter that I find disturbing (ie. Hivefled and its predecessor, and one or two of the 'Helmsman' fics), and a bunch that I simply wasn't in the mood for at the time.

I spent almost the entirety of May really sick with the flu-from-hell, and thus spent that time re-reading favorite fic, reading though the entirety of the Homestuck kink-meme, and going through the AO3 Homestuck section reading a lot of the fic I missed the first time. This continued in through June, and although I still have a few on my 'pending' list  I've moved on to the the 'check every day for updates while poking into alternative mediums' stage. This means that I'm pretty much at that point where I'm 'in between' fandoms- not wanting to move on, but no longer having a surplus of unread fic.

However... as it happens, the Homestuck fandom has somehow reminded me of my old love of SPACE OPERA. There are some great Homestuck fics involving adventures and tragedies IN SPACE, but having been reminded how much I once loved that genre, I found myself strangely nostalgic for old favorite books and fics.

As it turns out, I somehow do not have e-book versions of the specific series I wanted to reread on my computer, and most of my actual books are still in storage and inaccessible... and I own the library money and a book that I lost almost two years ago now... but! It's been a long time since I read Undocumented Features, which has been my favorite SPACE OPERA universe for a long time. Okay, so admittedly, I tend to reread the Symphony of the Sword arc every few years, until I reach the unfinished arc and get annoyed by the time skip and the fact that the series isn't being updated as frequently as it used to. However, it's been a really long time since I reread UF from the start, and so that is what I am currently doing in between checking for updates, checking job postings for the illusive 'job I qualify for that isn't a cashier or server' and occasionally taking the time to watch various home improvement shows or play Kingdoms of Amalur.